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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T09:29:18+00:00

We are a very small mobile company (building an application for the iphone) and

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We are a very small mobile company (building an application for the iphone) and we are currently considering hosting services. We are currently leaning towards Amazon’s hosting/web services. Accordingly, I have some questions:

1) Can I create an admin account on AWS and assign user accounts to developers that should have access to most (but not all) features.

2) Do we need to learn / use AWS APIs in the development of our product? I don’t like the
idea of having to create hooks into a hosting service.

3) It looks like the pricing for AWS scales with usage. So, since we are in development and have only developers accessing the server right now, am I right that the cost will be quite low if anything?

4) How does AWS do version management? We have several developers scattered throughout the country. Each will need to checkout the the recent build from the server for development
on his local box. Basically, something like SVN. Is this possible?

5) I am guessing we need something like a dev, svn, and production server? Is this right? If so, how do I set this up and find out the associated costs?

6) We are considering a few database options, among them NoSQL and Neo4j – will we be able to do this using AWS? The server language will be Java.

Thanks for your time.

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  1. Editorial Team

    To answer your questions:

    1. Yes, kind of. There is Identity and Access Management offered by AWS, but it’s not the easiest solution to use. Having said that, it can allow you to lock down some of the access activities on an account so that you have some control over your users. I would say that AWS is still very much a single-user environment for server administrators.
    2. You could get away using only the management console. Your use of scripting may only be required if you want to run batch or periodic activities (eg. take a snapshot of all machines at 2am every night).
    3. Costs for EC2 are low, especially for the Micro machine sizes. But keep in mind that the idea of cloud computing is the availability of on-demand resources for short term use. If you run dev machines needlessly over night then you will still be paying! And if someone launches an Extra Large machine (or 30 machine instances) then you will suddenly find yourself with bigger bills than expected.
    4. (5. and 6. as well) Amazon EC2 is really about issuing you the boxes. What you do thereafter is fully up to you. You can create snapshots daily of your machines, you can deploy SVN and noSQL etc. etc.

    I’ve been seriously into EC2 for a while now, and lots of companies are starting to look at the idea you propose. There are benefits to giving staff on-demand compute power, without having to manage any infrastructure in-house. But I will re-iterate my first point that EC2 is very much a single-user, server administration environment, which doesn’t lend itself to being used as a dev playground without additional tools. (Or at least it becomes a challenging task if you have several devs spread around in your company).

    I own a business that helps companies use EC2 for dev/lab/playground type of environments. I won’t directly flog it here, but will show a quick demo we just put on DropBox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16347737/RequestEC2Machines.html Feel free to request a machine to see how adding process to EC2 can help meet your goals.

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